Tuesday, March 14, 2017

Gateposts
can be stubborn. But I’ve learned a thing or two about working with
impossibly-heavy things with only hand-tools, and one of those things is that nothing
is impossible, including gateposts, and the way you do a gatepost is this:

You
unbolt the gate from its broken post and then you lay the whole huge thing down
on the ground with the new gatepost. Bolt the gate onto the new one. Then you
lift the whole heavy thing up by your own buff self so the bottom end of the
post slips into the two-foot hole you just dug the old gatepost out of. Then
you fiddle around with it until you can latch the gate shut to the opposite
post. Find a couple of bracing sticks to temporarily hold the gate still until
you pour your cement. Mount your permanent bracing poles back onto the new
gatepost and go do something else until the cement dries. After a day or so you
come back to see if anybody’s messed with it. If they have then you’re simply
screwed. But if they haven’t, you knock the temporary sticks off and the gate
will now swing and latch for you admirably, or at least as though it were built
that way. Ask anyone who’s inclined toward working with impossibly heavy
objects in the backcountry, or any engineer. Working backwards is a reasonable
way of dealing with intractable problems and is also a serviceable way of
looking at the world in general. God was not an engineer. She merely created
them, and only God, as any honest engineer or cowboy will tell you, is perfect.

Two
bags of cement have been lying in the barn since last season’s fire crew was
sent over the hill to fix this very post. The outfitter had been using the
pasture without permission for a while, which was okay as long as he was
respectful. But then he’d backed his horse trailer into the gatepost, broke it
off at the ground and didn’t fix it. After that everyone was letting their
stock in, including the sport riders, leaving nothing but dirt and horseshit
for the Forest Service string that actually had work to do down here.

These
mountains tried to burn themselves up in the summer of 2000, an unprecedented
fire season the news dubbed “Firestorm 2000”, and isn’t the news a funny thing?
It’s about stories to put us to sleep with false lullabies or to keep us awake
with nightmares. No in-between narratives need apply. It’s about selling
product, and the three biggest products in 2000 were that the Northern Rockies
had burnt up with “Firestorm 2000” and it was all the environmentalists’ fault,
that Global Warming was actually a mental disorder that could be traced to
chemicals placed in our water supplies by communists and that George Bush
really hadn’t stolen the election. You have to admit that, if nothing else, the
news is consistent.

Hundreds
of thousand of acres actually were profoundly affected by fire, in the
populated Bitterroot Valley as well as down here in the wilderness, and a lot
of it did burn hot. But what actually occurred can be explained more accurately
in abstract concepts like ecology, which teaches us that while any given fire’s
perimeter is measured in acres on the map by the sum total of its outer
boundaries, the land within that perimeter is never completely charred. Lots of
the land has either been burnt only in its understory, which actually cleans
the place up, or is left untouched. Global Warming notwithstanding, this is
called a mosaic pattern in the forest vernacular, and that’s how it looks. Almost
like a giant jigsaw puzzle if you’re up at the lookout on top of Salmon
Mountain, or in an airplane. Old fire scars merge into new ones, multi-aged
canopy colors mingle like genetic codes, and it’s actually the most healthy
thing for forests, and the most economical for taxpayers when you consider how
expensive it would be to manually clean up the mess we’ve made of our mountains
over the last century.

But
never mind, says the news. Abstract concepts are not newsworthy and besides,
it’s much more spangly to believe that the whole place burnt up because of
environmentalists who may as well have burnt down Disneyland for all the bad
press we got.

And
what’s true to the nature of the news is also true to the natures of most fire
crews, like the fire crew who was supposed to fix this gatepost last Fall and
who panic-stashed their cement bags in the barn instead when all hell broke
loose in the populated Bitterroot, where there was money to be made.

“Never
mind!” they cried in the general direction of the gatepost and then raced back
over Nez Perce Pass as fast as the gravel road allowed for their share of the
overtime and hazard pay the Forest Service bribes its help with to put their
life and lungs on the fireline. Chump change, really, when you think that you
can make more money working full-time at McDonald’s. But don’t think about it,
because fire’s exciting and adventure’s your real pay. That and winter beer
money.

In
their excitement the fire crew didn’t think about a good place to store the
bags of cement, failed to pick a dry spot for the bags to stay put for the
winter, which was how long they knew those bags were going to stay put. Fire
crews are predictable in this way, and so it’s not surprising when I find the
bags in a wet corner of the barn with their sides hardened and just enough good
cement left in the middle of the bags to do a good enough job. We’re only
trying to keep the outfitter’s stock out of the guard station’s pasture this
season, and it’ll be good enough when I’m finished. I was sent over here to fix
a gatepost, not to lay the foundation for a new tomorrow, which I’d prefer.

I’ve
worked sporadically in the backcountry for the Forest Service for many seasons
between treeplanting and unemployment, and opinions are a natural outcome of
backbreaking drudgery combined with silence. Look at American frontier history
for clues. It’s always the same, and to the occasional armed and angry hunter
I’d run into on a lonely trail who would wonder aloud how I could stomach
working for the same repressive government that framed Randy Weaver, I’d say,
“Hell, I’m worth ten bucks an hour just for my opinions and I work my butt off
besides. So can you please just pick up your cigarette butts anyways?” Actually
I only said that once, but it sure felt good and left a durable memory. I wish
I’d said it more often.

I’m
just ripping open the first bag of cement with the tip of my fire shovel when
the bass riff from a set of sub-woofers rolls down the mountain, pounding the
solitude out of a wide square mile of silence. I feel its sassy bottom beating
against my skin, jabbing at my heart and rattling my brain until I toss my
shovel hard against the post, causing it to sway slightly out of its
hard-fought kilter, and let’s admit right here that there can be no account
written about the Wilderness movement, or at least the fight to get enough
people to see the value of relatively-intact ecosystems, that would not be an
understatement. It was all very heartbreaking and hard. Too hard, too
heartbreaking, and the upper Selway country is no different. The Elk City road,
the roadthat the car containing the
blasting sub-woofers is driving down, is a case in point. It’s a little more
than a hundred miles long and is really nothing but a long stretch of
single-track dirt and gravel ribbon rolling through the heart of the Northern
Rockies, the Land that the Nimiipuu[i]
knew well and loved more, from western Montana and over into the South Fork of
the Clearwater in Idaho, seventy miles to the west of where I’m working. It’s
just a common logging road by today’s standards, but it rolls through the
largest wild area left in the lower forty-eight states where today’s standards
shouldn’t apply. The Elk City road is an artifact, left over from the time when
the Wilderness Law stared the Timber Beast down in ’64. It had been scratched
out by a CCC crew in the thirties, but the hopeful loggers wanted to turn it
into their haul road for getting the cut out before the whole place was
declared off-limits to them, which it finally was after years of heartbreak.

Compromise,
I suppose, is the way of politics, but it’s a dirty word when it comes to
what’s left of the Quiet World because the Elk City Road is now grandfathered
into the Wilderness Law, and where in a New York bass player’s world is there
any space allotted for congressionally-mandated boundaries on solitude? I, for
instance, work for short pay back here and I count on doing that work in
silence while I take my half an hour or however long it takes to get my
gatepost to its right kilter. Silence is my real pay, and shouldn’t one be able
to count on silence any time one can find it these days?

But
now I’m going to be a victim to some guy’s obnoxious mating behavior usually
associated with overcrowded cities. “Center Of The Universe approaching,” I
mutter through clenched teeth in time to the bass riff. “Make way, make way.”
These guys might as well be riding elephants. How on God’s Green Earth, I would
like to know, can people be so clueless?

I should always be careful what I wish for when I invoke something with as
warped a sense of humor as the Earth, because I’m about to find out.

The
sub-woofer gets louder as it closes in, slows its progress just a bit at the
intersection of the guard station with the Elk City Road about a quarter-mile
uphill as his car turns into the long driveway. “Thump-thump-ba-bum-bum-thump!”
Louder still as it passes the old ranger house that used to really be a ranger
house through the Depression and up into the seventies when rustic appearances
were more in line with reality, Now it is a guest rental booked online by
DisneyCorp, but never mind.

An
eighties-something Camaro appears around the bend. It bangs its red tail
against an ancient rock in the dirt driveway and pulls into the turnaround next
to the pasture entrance. A young man is inside, mid-twenties, sunglasses and no
smile. He turns off his engine. Suddenly the woods scream back into their
former silence. Pine tops around the pasture sway imperceptibly in what passes
for confusion among their kind, and then relief if you can see it, because once
again the Selway River gurgling fifty yards away and I remind myself for the
thousandth time that although a tree’s innocence is always slightly damaged by
this kind of nonsense, it’s never irreparable. That’s what I like about the
mountains. They make you feel like you still have a chance.

I
remain squatting next to the fencepost in an effort to avoid eye contact,
fiddling with my level like I’m trying to true the post again before I pour the
cement. This is honest enough because it’s exactly what I’m trying to do other
than ignore this guy. Honesty’s important, I think, but it’s no use. The guy
slowly unfolds himself out of his Camaro and walks stiff-legged over to me with
what I take to be the fatalistic gait of someone who couldn’t have possibly
known what he was getting into when he turned off the highway in Darby a couple
hours back. With a car like that, how could he have? His running shoes squeak
in a new-bought way as he squats opposite to the fencepost and without
introduction asks in deeply accented English, “You know where is Horse Heaven?”

I’m stunned. I couldn’t have said it better myself. “Where you comin’ from,
man?” I ask, not quite knowing how to buff this intrusion back to what I
consider real, or at least real enough.

I’ve
seen their camp, of course, laid out about fifteen miles up the Elk City Road from
the guard station, high above the river, past Salmon Mountain. There’s a large
group of Hmong folks with a school bus and eight to ten older compact cars and
pickups on any given day. It lies about fifty miles into the wilderness. Lots
of garbage accumulates along the Elk City Road, which would be okay with me if
the garbage stayed within its congressionally mandated bounds. But it doesn’t
and I’ve also seen their plastic buckets, their bungied backpack frames, their
coolers stacked up and around the shady side of their school bus, and that’s
the thing. Their camp is legal enough, but their activity isn’t. They’re
picking morel mushrooms for money back in a protected roadless area, which is forbidden
by the Law of Good Intent, which is where all good wilderness laws come from. I
want to tell him that right away, or to simply tell him where the camp is and
get him out of my sphere of annoyance. But I wrestle with my familiar,
self-inflicted conundrum instead, that if I wanted easier work for more money,
I wouldn’t be down here planting gateposts all by myself, would I? So I hold my
tongue and let this guy squat in glorious silence a minute more while I think
up a good response.

As
everyone knows, rules are made for good reasons and for bad ones, and rules for
wilderness follow this same trajectory. There are many bad wilderness rules. Good
wilderness rules, however, are mostly made with little precedent and the best
intentions to protect these last places from those who, for instance, make bad
rules. So the good wilderness rules are, by definition, very good rules indeed,
and so it is that there are some very, very good reasons for prohibiting
commercial mushroom picking in wilderness areas.

One
of which is this guy! Who does he think he is, coming down here clueless, from
Portland of all places (another planet!!) disturbing my peace with his thumping
pheromones and then further insulting my sanctuary by asking me
how he can further degrade it? But I digress.

Anyone
who’s inadvertently stumbled into a secluded marijuana patch understands how
some people tend to get proprietary and downright testy when someone steps into
what they consider “their” economic space. Whether or not it’s on your public
lands matters not at all as long as they think they can get away with it.
Unregulated greed is ugly when it comes to the Land. Ask any mountaintop that’s
been removed, and that’s usually legal. So it follows that if you allow roving
bands of commercial mushroom pickers who are fond of packing pocket pistols
into hard-to-access mountainous public lands, you get an ego-driven Wild West
show not necessarily compatible with what most folks expect within wilderness
boundaries.

But
every year’s summer months have always brought fire to the Northern Rockies,
and now, as our globe heats up beyond redemption the fires are more numerous, hotter,
bigger. They are, in two words, very exciting, the kind of thing newscasters in
search of marketable human drama find irresistible, and Firestorm 2000 was no
different. The media line that time was that this whole place was
crispy-creamed by environmentalists and now there’s nothing left but zombie elk
walking the river bottoms looking for hapless hunters to gore and--if you’re
among of the hordes of pickers who flock to burnt-up public lands they heard
about the summer before on the news--easy-to-sell morel mushrooms! And so, for
a few months a year, these pickers practice a peculiar brand of post-modern
paganism, resting upon the three pillars of morel mushroom mysticism. Ecology, economics
and sex.

So
first of all, let’s be clear about that last thing. Morels are not an
aphrodisiac, as some folks—mostly men-- really, really want them to be. And they
don’t come from Heaven either, as their cost suggests. They’re just mushrooms.
Their niche in the Northern Rockies is a hot mid-to-high elevation forest the
Spring following a fire the year before. The burnt-over forest floor combined
with the moisture from snowmelt and Spring rains creates the ideal bed for
their fruiting body—the mushroom—to sprout and cast its spores, and they wait
years for this semi-regular, natural occurrence. They typically come in thick
enough after a fire that a local can collect enough to fill the space in her
freezer where the elk she shot last fall used to be, which is their big plus. But
they are tasty, too, and have become trendy at fashionable restaurants throughout
the United States, Canada and elsewhere, which has turned it into a product, a
“natural resource” free for the taking off of our public commons, the national
forests. Much like beaver pelts in past centuries, their popularity has spiked
their going price enough to encourage classic pioneer attitudes about “resources”
located on public lands, such as greed, lawlessness and land abuse.

In
addition to coming in thick after a fire, they’re also easily identifiable
because they’re the only mushroom that looks like your brain, and on the strength
of that alone it’s hard for the hordes who descend upon last year’s burns to
mistake them for anything more poisonous than an intelligent sex toy. They pick
them as fast as they find them and if they’re lucky they’ll make twenty to
thirty dollars an hour stooping over all day long cutting mushrooms off at the
stump, stashing them in a five-gallon buckets bungy-corded onto a pack frame
and hauling them out to camp, where they’re dusted off and sold by the pound to
the buyers who make the real money off your labor. To repeat, you may as well
be working at McDonalds, but never mind.

You
are free to do all this and more only if you’re willing to put up with hordes.
They show up every Spring, after a big burn on forested public lands in the
Rockies, sometimes thicker than the mushrooms they seek, from all parts of the
country with all issues and attitudes represented. Most of them, I’ll admit,
are only looking for an excuse to hang out in the woods, like myself. But like
all hordes, there’s more than the occasional desperado who can’t find regular
work, who packs heat instead of spores, and who has all those issues people who
don’t have steady work are dealing with and maybe want you to deal with too if
you bump into them out in a burn in what they consider ‘their” economic
territory. Also, like the sum total of all human hordes, they feel free leaving
their garbage wherever they figure God intended it to be left. Grrrr! Poetry
and politics usually don’t mix, but Howard Zahniser[ii]
pulled it off when he got Congress to agree to his definition of wilderness as
“an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man
(sic), where man himself is a visitor who does not remain”. Where, I would
ask, is this kind of drama in that poem?

A
randy kinglet has been kissing out his mating call above us constantly, and
other than the wishing of the river nearby that’s the only sound passing
between us as I ponder the Universe, which reminds me of when I became intimate
with the kinglet’s call. I followed one around a stand of bull pine shading the
Buckhorn Cabins and RV Park in Zortman, Montana during a blizzard for over two
hours with a pair of cheap binoculars, trying to match the bird with the call and
with absolutely no expertise in the matter. Kinglets are ubiquitous in western
forests, as is its kissing call, but I hadn’t made the personal connection
between the two yet. More importantly, my choices for killing time in Zortman
were limited. We were there to plant trees at the Pegasus gold mine in the
Little Rockies when a spring storm laid us up for three days. The storm dumped
two feet of snow on the rubble of what used to be Spirit Mountain, formerly one
of the most prominent peaks in Eastern Montana. In fact, before its demise it
was one of the only peaks in Eastern Montana. We’d been hired with a
straight face by Pegasus Gold to “reclaim” the mountain corpse so that the
giant gold company could get its reclamation bond back from the state. Anyone
who’s planted trees knows that it’s often impossible to see the ground well
enough to pick a suitable spot for your little seedlings to survive with two
inches of snow on the ground, let alone two feet on top of soccer ball sized
cobble. We couldn’t go home because home was four hundred miles to the west, in
the Bitterroot Valley. This was in the late eighties and I remember the
discussion of the crew revolving around climate change even back then, the
consensus being that a few trees growing on the rubble that Spring would be
better than none at all, and so our only moral option was to wait the storm out
until the weather warmed and we could finish the job. Poor Spirit Mountain, but
we stayed and waited to do the best we could, even though staying meant either
entering into the comatose trance induced by endless cycles of HBO movies in
those tiny log cabins that served as motel rooms, feeding quarters into the
poker machine at the bar or catching up on your birding. I chose numb fingers
over a numb mind, which says something about how I find myself in this current
situation.

The
guy is waiting patiently, which is a good sign, but I don’t feel as though he’s
remarked the sacredness he’s interrupted. As he squats silently across from me
I have no idea, really, what he’s thinking because I don’t ask. I look at his
face instead for clues, but his face is hidden behind wraparound sunglasses so
there are no clues. What I think I see are two kids in an inner-city fourplex
with a young wife waiting for a money order in the downstairs mailbox. Refugee
camps, maybe. War in tropical places for all I know, with handguns in the
glovebox, yikes! How can I know without asking, and I’ll be damned if I’m going
to do that!

I
use my imagination instead, because I am like everyone else. Tiny brain, large
imagination. And also, I hate my peace disturbed, more so down here in my
sanctuary where I also find myself prone to impatience as much as any of the other
human curses we must face and fight against every day if we want to evolve our
species out of the hole we’ve created for its offspring. Finally, given the
setting and context, his cheap sunglasses are boring, so I go for honesty,
which is important.

“You
know it’s illegal to pick mushrooms for money down here in the wilderness,” I
tell him. “In. The. Wilderness.” I repeat. It’s not a question.

He
takes his sunglasses off at this. Embarrassed, I look down into my posthole. He
looks down also to see what I’m looking at and, seeing a hole, looks back up at
me. “Tell me,” he asks, implacably urgent now. “What is this ‘wilderness’?”

Here’s
something you may not know. When you devote your misspent working life to the
woods, your guard is down when the big city shows up. You have irrational
urges, to lock a door or at least to shut down any explanations for something
as profound and dear to you as your wilderness. There’s not just a little bit
of misanthropy involved. Why not? That’s why I’m down here getting bit up by
mosquitoes and no-see-ums and planting a fencepost for short pay. I’d really
like to know. Is there any common sense or simple sense of irony left in this
obnoxious world we seem to prefer anymore? I tend to think not! “What’s
wilderness?!” I think incredulously. Tell it to the marines, dude.

But
then, right in the middle of this rare, quiet moment in a world getting smaller
and noisier with every spin on its axis, I experience that flash of recognition,
that illumination of fantasies that show a person under no uncertain terms that
their fantasies about what the hell they think they’re doing with their lives
are as sublime as they are untenable. Because really, this isn’t my wilderness
at all. It’s really just the home of the Nimiipuu, who didn’t have a word for
“wilderness”, and who were booted out of here by the same immigrant hordes who
bombed this guy’s tribe off their mountains in Southeast Asia a mere century
later. What would their answer be to this guy, I wonder. Worlds apart from
mine, I’ll bet.

I
fall back on my default position, then, on something I know for sure and something
you probably know, too. That right now there are vertebrate species,
particularly the wet-skinned amphibian type, who are becoming endangered and
going extinct within these nominally-protected wilderness areas. Environmental
degradation and its resultant resource conflicts know no bounds set by Congress
or bought with foundation money, and just because it’s easy for those of us
lucky enough to experience true quiet firsthand to understand the difference
between silence and obnoxiousness, that doesn’t mean anything of lasting value
if the planet and, by definition, we are not saved.

The
point, of course, is simple math. Urban areas are where all environmental
policies, all policies in fact, are ultimately made or broken. It can’t be
otherwise in a true democracy, or even in an imploding one like ours. Cities
are where the people are, the votes, and a vote’s a vote. If any definition is
going to carry water in a situation like this it’s that true human-based
democracy needs vast swaths of relatively intact ecosystems to survive, and
Democracy is what is lacking in the Land. And one of those democratic votes is waiting
patiently for my explanation of this word, “wilderness”!

Damn.The moment glows as rare as a gold nugget in a creek you stoop over to sip
from twenty miles back, an opportunity as rare as anything else that never happens.
This guy really, really doesn’t know, and he really wants to. I give him high
marks for coming up with great one-liners, and it’s all I can do to keep from
high-fiving him now. The only reason I don’t is because we’re strangers, and I
don’t want to give him the wrong impression in case I’m the one who has to
drive up to Horse Heaven and give his crew the news.

And
with that hesitation I let my opportunity slip away. “That’s a good one, man,”
I say instead with a grin. He grins back and the connection is made, which is
what l like about down here. Connections are easy when you have to make them.
There are fewer distractions.

The
kinglet above us continues his high song. Spirit Mountain is dead, he tells me,
which I know. It got a flat top from Pegasus Gold, who split the country when
the price of gold dipped below the price of honesty for Canadian mining
companies. In place of Spirit Mountain they left a gigantic, stepped pyramid of
blasted cliff and cobble that looks to all the world like a sacrificial alter
to a God with a very sick sense of humor indeed.

This
kind of God can be best defined by one of His high priests, a road engineer that
I had the luck to meet and converse with at the Zortman mine. In the fall of
1989, he was tasked by the company with showing our hippy crew around the
planting sites on our first reclamation project. When we came to the giant pyramid,
we let out a collective gasp, which, to his credit, he noticed. He was in the
middle of explaining the importance of knowing where the blind spot was for the
dinosaur-sized haul trucks whose tires were bigger than our crummy. He gave us
exactly one moment of respectful silence.

“Well,”
he finally said matter-of-factly. “It was an old mountain, anyway,” and without
skipping another beat he went on to explain how it was company policy to wear
our hardhats at all times on their premises in case a dinosaur-sized truck happened
to crush our crummy. He lived in the little highline town of Malta where good
jobs with benefits were as rare as the buffalo in Malta are now who were the
only ones who ever made a real living there. He was probably making twenty
dollars an hour at the time, with benefits, which was pretty good wages for
back then. But now his job’s long gone and the cost of the toxic pit where a
mountain used to be has boomeranged back to the People, where the mining
company knew it would go. But the kinglet still sings there in the scrubby bull
pine, where we planted them long ago in the rubble of what was Spirit Mountain.
How the neo-greens would sing the praises of that happy serendipity, except for
the simple fact that neo-greens don’t know how to speak Kinglet any more than I
do. Maybe she’s saying that the earth will definitely abide, no matter what you
wise-guys (Homo sapiens) decide
to do or not to do with the mess you made. It’s just you wise guys who may not.

I
may have let my opportunity pass, but I’m not ready to give up. “Wilderness,” I
begin, puffing my explanation up as large as possible and then… alas! Clichés
ambush me despite my best precautions against them. “…Is a state of mind.” The
hot air steams out of my mouth before I can cork it. We just can’t seem to help
ourselves, can we?

“You mean,” his brow furrowing, clearly trying to do his part to keep his end of
the conversation up until he gets the information he wants. “Like Idaho?
Montana? Which state is Horse Heaven?”

So
much for my crippled sense of cultural relativism. “It’s where you can’t pick
mushrooms for money,” I clarify, my explanation deflated back down to mere
misanthropy. “It’s illegal. And you can’t throw your trash around here either,
y’know?”

I
could fit this whole wilderness thing into the simplest quip if I wanted to,
the one that the gutted Wilderness Society lawyers stole and still use today,
“In wildness,” I could quote Thoreau, “is the salvation of the world.” That
recipe has lost none of its power in spite of decades of misuse, which speaks
volumes about its durability. Good old Thoreau, and I’ll admit his is just one
of many, many recipes for saving our planet. But it’s about good as the next
one, and maybe better than most. Can I ever hope to convince this guy that my
wilderness is holy because it’s been declared so by an unholy political system,
which is the definition of a miracle? Maybe I don’t have to. What’s it matter
who calls what what, as long as you understand how rare chances are these days,
and how a relatively unspoiled country can make you feel like you still have
one. I give it one more tepid, yet honest, try.

“If
we let you guys make the big mushroom money down here…in the wilderness…we
might as well let the logging trucks roll over the mountain, too, and then
where would we be?”

“I
think Idaho,” he answers, smiling. “Def’nitely Idaho.” His palms turn up, he
rocks back on his heels and squints at the treetops as though reaching into the
depths of his own cultural memory, which is not mine yet. “What logging trucks,
anyways?” he asks.

“The
ones you don’t see down here!” I snap before I realize that my well-honed
cynicism is not only misplaced but worse, misunderstood and, worst of all,
unappreciated.

“Look,”
I say, settling my tack back to the worker bee within us. “Whether you guys get
away with picking mushrooms up there or not, you’re not gonna make it to Horse
Heaven in that rig.” I wave my gloved hand toward his red Camaro with the
racing stripe across the top and the fin on the trunk for keeping the rear-end
from sliding when you’re going a hundred miles an hour around a racetrack or a
freeway. If he’s lucky he’ll be going fifteen miles an hour on the good
stretches. “The road gets worse as you get up toward Salmon Mountain. And steep
with lots of rocks and ruts. Then you gotta go a good ways past Salmon
Mountain. You’ll bottom out and punch a hole in your gas tank or something.
Especially the way you’re driving.” This, I think, is a gentle warning, a
closure of sorts, because I’d really rather get back to thinking about simple
things like my gatepost. “And I’ll bet you put Premium in that car, too,” I add
for good measure. “You’re in the wilderness, man, is what I’m sayin’. That
means you won’t make enough money picking mushrooms or doing anything in here
to pay for the damage you do. Nobody does. That’s what wilderness means.”

I’m
suddenly quite surprised and satisfied with this explanation, to which he lifts
his eyes up over the treetops again and off to the west, where all he can
possibly see are more tall trees because nothing else is visible from the guard
station pasture. “So,” he says, his brow furrowed again, his smile gone. “You
drive up this mountain you call Salmon. Go a way more. Then Horse Heaven.” It’s
not a question.

“That’s
right,” I say, finally enlightened. “You’ll be in the wilderness, in Horse
Heaven, where you guys’ll find boatloads of mushrooms and make bucket loads of
money because you’re not supposed to be back there doing that.”

He
smile again, and I’ll just bet he used a GPS to get down here, not a map. He
has no idea where he is heading other than on adventure and he’s not having any
of my warnings.

And
he’s right, of course. I can’t stop him, and I ought to know. If anyone can
recognize that glow of boomtown mentality from a mile away, it’s me. I’ve
suffered from the same disorder all my life. Look at American frontier history
for clues. It’s always the same, just like in the old days when we set up a
treeplanting camp on top of what was left of a mountain or some other
ecological disaster. We didn’t always know exactly where we were, but we always
knew that we were part of epic doings in an epic country, and so we fooled
ourselves into our backbreaking work with the same high expectations of spangly
financial success while at the same time reverting as fast as we could back to
the campfire cultures of our ancestors, which is the real point of going to all
the trouble in the first place. Priests, for example, are on about the same pay
scale as your average treeplanter, trail dog or mushroom picker and just like
priests, busting your ass in the woods for chump change is really more of a
vocation than a job. All you really end up with is a deep personal satisfaction
combined with a worldly dread when you look back at where you’ve been, that all
hell’s about to break loose and you’re ready for it, which I believe is a good,
honest perspective to have these days if you want to do anything about that hell
other than to just put Jesus to sleep.

The
guy’s sneakers squeak as he rises from his squat and walks back to his Camaro.
The outfitter hasn’t had his stock in this year, and it’s too early for the
sport riders, so there’s a flush of green starting to show as I look across the
pasture toward the river. We’re just shy of the Solstice, the longest day of
the year, which goes until ten at night at this latitude, and so the five
o-clock sun has that magic summer angle to it that sets the new growth off into
the exact hue of contemplative emerald that people go to all that trouble
having lawns for, just the kind of afternoon you set your sights on in the
hopes of hitting as many of them as possible. I consider this guy’s question
with misanthropy’s opposite twin, solidarity, because there are only a few
choices down here.

“Make
sure you tell your buddies what I said,” I call after him. He gives me the
finger-thumb grunge salute and grins wide this time.

“I be sure to tell them,” he says as he stoops
into his rig. “What you said.” He slams the door and I can hear him chuckling. The
rhythm starts almost immediately upon entry, and off he goes, the fin-crowned
tail end dutifully banging on the ancient rock in the road once more for
perfect cadence. This time I notice that he has a cast-iron frying pan set on
the back shelf, which bangs against his racy curved rear window. That’ll cost
him about three hundred bucks, I figure, but he’ll make it up to Horse Heaven come
hell or high water, because he’s a child of pilgrims, just like me, and he’ll
be successful enough in his purpose, which is my purpose, too.

Wednesday, March 8, 2017

"Even if they
never got anything for it, it was cheap at that price. Without malice
aforethought I had given them the best show that was ever staged in their
territory since the landing of the Pilgrims! It was easily worth fifteen
million bucks to watch me put the thing over.”

Charles Ponzi, 1882-1949

Proprietary
Capitalism is our modern, Bizzarro-world term for the relatively-old scheme of
con artists separating “fools” from their money. It’s where We the People are
not allowed access to the information we need in order to make informed
decisions about industries who scheme to profit off of our ignorance, and it’s
all the rage now. “Intellectual property rights” was the battle cry when Silicon
Valley started cannibalizing its apple orchards and pooping out shiny gizmos,
and now you see the shiny poop of intellectual property rights everywhere, on
the chemical industry, on the privatized school industry, on the music
industry, on everything. Our very culture has been devoured and “privatized” by
the bastards in full view of everyone, a daylight heist, and our only questions
seem to have been “How much is the next shiny gizmo going to cost and when can
I get mine?”

Speaking
of digestion: Consider all the
high-priced claims of oil patch con artists about how the Bakkan oil patch and
its lower intestine, the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) are going to poop out endless
jobs across the North Dakota plains and downward towards New Orleans and
everywhere else the Black Snake slithers. (Eee…eww!) Jobs, right? Dirty jobs,
but jobs all the same. Right?

Well…consider
the words of a petroleum industry operative who spent almost four decades working
for the likes of AMOCO, BP, and other such bastards. Art Berman currently makes a living as an oil industry expert,
a consultant and contributor for corporate news outlets on oil trends for the
smart investor who desires to place her bets on the table where the money flows
downhill, toward her. Easy Street, right? But wait…On March 1st,
Berman wrote in Forbes Magazine that:

“All major Bakken producers continue
to lose money at current wellhead prices…there may be nowhere for the Bakken to
go but down. Higher oil prices may not help much because the best days for the
play are behind us. Future profits were sacrificed for short-term objectives
that lost the companies and their shareholders money…investors should be
worried. As analysts cheered the resilience of shale plays after the
2014 price collapse, nearly a billion barrels of Bakken oil were
produced at a loss...vast volumes of oil were squandered at low prices for the
sake of cash flow to support unmanageable debt loads and to satisfy investors
about production growth.[i]”

Why is this not the news we as well as the low-lying
investor should have been hearing since the pipeline was first announced in
2014? After all, wouldn’t Republican governors who would sing the praises of
“private property” while simultaneously authorizing “eminent domain” seizures
of the very same at least want to know that the whole scheme is based on an economic model that even Charles Ponzi couldn't job to the rich of his day? Why are we hearing instead about all the “jobs” that Ponzi's economic scheme will generate for all us poor folk now?

“The Bakken play represents the
fullest application of modern horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing
technologies,” Berman
writes. But with a couple of downsides.

“There is no way to stay away from
water and it is produced from day one in large volumes. The Bakken has produced
1.5 billion barrels of water along with its 2.2 billion barrels of oil over the
decades. Where are they putting it and what does that cost?”

Indeed.
Where are they putting all that
water? And furthermore, what have they put in all that water? Well, intellectual property rights dictate that
these Lying Leviathans don’t have to tell you any of that, because the
information you need in order to know whether or not you are being poisoned for the sake
of someone else's quick buck is…get ready…private property!

Wow,
and that’s the root of the other downside that Berman mentions in his article. Think
of the underground fracking patch as a giant balloon with finite pressure and
lots of holes being drilled into it. At first the additional pressure needed
for oil to bubble to the surface is generated with the toxic, proprietary slurry mix. After a while,
though, the pressure needed to make the oil bucks bubble out of any single well is
generated more and more by the gas pockets that develop underground in relation
to the environmentally-destructive fracking activities. From then on, as the
patch gets more and more overdrilled (which the Bakkan has been) the pressure
drops for all the wells and everybody’s oil money heads south of the Red Line.
This is basic physics, and basic capitalism, never mind the environmental
costs, which investors never do.

So,
in the oil expert’s own words, while the very efficiency of fracking technology
has led to the over-drilling and the rapid depletion of the field, “pressure data (of the over-drilled
patch) is not publicly available and is
needed to complete the case.”

Did
you catch that? The evidence for depletion of the Bakkan oil patch, the very information
we as a society (and she as an investor) need to determine whether or not the
environmental catastrophe of the patch and the associated pipelines is in any
way economically justified is proprietary, under the very same rules that has kept the
details of the environmental catastrophe itself (the fracking mix, for instance) from us all
along. It’s none of your business, the Rich Man tells us. That’s enough
democracy for you. We’re running this country now, so run along and eat some
cake.

Why
is the Dakota Access Pipeline being built at all? Quite simply “…for the sake of cash flow to support
unmanageable debt loads and to satisfy investors about production growth.”

It’s
not for jobs. It’s not for “energy self-sufficiency”. It’s not even for any
traditionally-defined version of free-market capitalism. It’s a Ponzi scheme where
the Rich Man and the politicians in his pocket are the only beneficiaries and We
The People and the Land are the chumps.

Nice,
huh? And that’s not coming from cyber-left field. It’s in black and white, in
Forbes, and maybe that’s the beauty of this horrible moment we have willfully
visited upon ourselves. Black and white becomes color, at least it becomes the Bizarro comic-book world we should have recognized it as all along.